Brew Dog - Digital transformation, Craft Beer and Blockchain
A digital transformation project enabling new incentivisation, engagement and loyalty mechanisms
Leveraging cloud native infrastructure to build message driven data processing pipelines, modernising monolithic software, enabling new forms of customer engagement and incentivisation with the power of blockchain
About the Project
BrewDog is a successful, global business with hundreds of outlets and thousands of retailers world wide. Not only do they produce some of the finest craft beer on the planet, they proactively seek out cutting edge tools to drive innovation.
We have been working with BrewDog over the last year to modernise their existing infrastructure to move to a cloud native software stack decoupling existing services to enable more agility within the business.
We have delivered a suite of tools including scalable APIs, operational and reporting solutions, data processing pipelines as well as integration with cutting edge layer 2 public blockchain technologies.
Implementation
Several solutions have been deployed to fulfil the requirements of BrewDog, below we cover the main components we have so far delivered
Cloud native architecture
- At the heart of the solution is the a move to cloud native services, rethinking how data and services work together
- Tools such as Amazon Web Services, CircleCI, Serverless as well as message queues and Cloud Databases have been used
- Scalable and cost effective services which are decoupled and message driven now provide a new backbone
Scalable APIs
- Underpinning the new service design is a set of NodeJS restful APIs providing abstractions over key services providing a backbone for mobile applications, back office tooling as well as user authentication and data storage.
- APIs are built on top of a Open API schema and provide a secure, authenticated data access
Customer loyalty
- At the core of BrewDog are its loyal and engaged customer base of punks
- All the changes are made with an eye on how we can improve customer engagement, maintaining a health ecosystem and rewarding users
- Leveraging a Ethereum layer 2 scaling solution, creating loyalty schemes through tokenisation
- Experimenting with crypto collectibles in the form of non-fungible tokens
Insight
- We have built web based solutions including a frontend data driven dashboard with operational insights
- Integration with several third party data feeds providing metrics on beer range, availability and operational criteria targets
Outcome
BrewDog is at the forefront of craft beer, the tooling we have developed enables new innovation, experimentation and helps the business react to changing needs and demands of its customers.
New and existing applications have been migrated and built on top of the above toolset facilitating new business demands.
Additional features and services can now also be plugged into existing data points, consuming data which was previous siloed and difficult to access.
We continue to work closely with BrewDog, providing consultancy and engineering expertise to enhance their platform.
